A Break in the Future

Feeling Like an Activist After the Arab Uprisings

Fuad Musallam

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Hardback

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English

University of Pennsylvania Press
22 July 2025

Middle Eastern history; Social & cultural anthropology; Human rights; Civil rights & citizenship; Pressure groups & lobbying

Investigates how Lebanese activists work through failure to keep the possibility of political change alive

A Break in the Future considers how activists keep hope alive and work toward future change when social movements fall apart and protests fail. Anthropologist Fuad Musallam investigates the endurance of political possibility in Beirut, Lebanon, between the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 and the Lebanese uprising of October 2019. Despite a regional collapse of political hope and a local inability to effect change in the context of political stasis, postponed elections, and the degradation of civil infrastructure, between every protest cycle a sizable number of people remained engaged and built toward future political opportunities. Through an analysis of activist strategies, Musallam explores the ways in which we grasp different phases of political (dis)engagement together. The book is motivated by a desire to better understand how to keep political possibility alive.

To make sense of how possibility endures, this book looks at the ebb and flow of political engagement together, that is, not only at the peaks of recent mobilizations but also at the times in between when, at first glance, little seems to be happening on the ground. Musallam explores how activists cultivated and maintained their political subjectivity—the active and engaged sense of self that motivates political action—across the decade's high and low points. He finds this political subjectivity to be the product of heartbreak and defeat as much as victory, as it underlies several movements at any one time and can sustain activists through multiple setbacks.

Musallam discovers that when political change seems most unlikely, a moment of rupture—or a ""break in the future""—becomes central to Lebanese activists' belief that their actions can and will transform their world. A Break in the Future ultimately argues that the experience of moments of rupture radically transforms what seems possible, and that the cultivation of these experiences keeps movements going even when things appear to fall apart.

By: Fuad Musallam
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781512828061
ISBN 10: 1512828068
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 22 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Fuad Musallam is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at University of Birmingham.

Reviews for A Break in the Future: Feeling Like an Activist After the Arab Uprisings

""Both original and timely, Fuad Musallam’s account provides an empirically rich and theoretically substantive ethnography of activist experience through the lens of Lebanese protest movements over the last decade."" * Craig Larkin, King's College London *